Question

There has been tremendous progress in agricultural practices after independence. Collect information in decades and prepare plackcards on A4 size sheet.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />You would be given 100 points for helping me​o​

Answer 1

Agricultural Development in India:

The term ‘Green Revolution’ refers to a sus­tained and continuous increase in agricultural pro­ductivity or a yield per acre take-off in traditional agriculture.

The stress is on intensive rather than extensive cultivation so as to raise productivity per hectare. It signifies a shift to the agricultural production function and the consequent increase in land productivity, i.e., yield per hectare.

 

The new strategy has two broad components the mechanical (or technological) package and the biological package. The former refers to the use of tractors, combines and other forms of machinery primarily as substitutes for labour. The latter refers to the raising of yields through the use of improved plant varieties such as hybrid corn or the new vari­eties of rice developed at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Because of the dramatic effects on yields of some of those new varieties the phenomenon is often referred to as the Green Revolution. But these new varieties raise productivity (yield) if they are combined with adequate and timely supply of water and addi­tional usage of chemical fertilisers. The main im­pact of biological package is to raise yields.

The stress is on using improved plant varieties in com­bination with fertilisers and pesticides to raise yields of rice or wheat. The founding of the Inter­national Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CINMYT) in Mexico and IRRI in the Philippines marked the beginning of a truly international ef­fort to develop high-yielding varieties (HYV) of grains suitable to the tropical conditions found in most of the LDCs.

The result has been a steady stream of new, high-yielding and other improved varieties of wheat and rice that have found growing accept­ance in most Asian countries.

 

This was supported by a rapid increase in the use of chemical fertilisers. By the 1970s, chemical fertilisers were in widespread use in India, Brazil and other countries. Unlike machinery, chemical fertilisers are highly divisible because they can be purchased in any quantity. Moreover, the applica­tion of a small dose of fertiliser is likely to raise productivity appreciably.

The Indian Experience:

In the mid-1960s, the Government of India adopted a new agricul­tural strategy which goes by different names seed-fertiliser-water technology, modern agricul­tural technology, or Green Revolution. In fact, the ‘Green Revolution’ has been the most important single technical advance in agriculture in India during the plan period.

 

It refers to the breeding of high-yield varieties of wheat and rice and their introduction into traditional agriculture so as to achieve a sustained or continuous breakthrough in agricultural production. This is really a yield per acre take-off in agriculture inasmuch as it seeks to raise productivity per acre by cultivating the same plot of land more intensively.

The new technology is ‘highly divisible’— usable on small peasant plots as readily as on large ones. It is yield-increasing rather than an acreage- expanding (that is, labour-saving) change. To ob­tain the needed water, where water from large irri­gation projects has been unavailable, many In­dian farmers have installed tube-wells with institutional credit.

Those who did not get such wells locally, use bamboo tubes wrapped with wire rather than steel tubing. By contrast, traditional technol­ogy relies on a pair of bullocks, a plough, the use of farmyard manure and seeds of poor quality.

The new strategy, called Intensive Agricul­tural Development Programme, was initiated and adopted on an experimental basis. Later on this was supplemented by the high-yielding varieties programme, covering the whole country. And con­siderable success has been achieved from the be­ginning. Since the mid-1960s, the usage of tradi­tional inputs was increasing at the annual average rate of 10%.

The new agricultural strategy adopted in In­dia in the late 1960s laid emphasis on intensive rather than extensive cultivation. This was, no doubt, desirable in a country characterised by a falling land-man ratio. There was, therefore, shift from mono- to multiple-cropping, particularly in those areas which are endowed with an assured supply of water. The spread of irrigation facilities also accelerated the process.

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